Eric Berger @chronsciguy 4m4 minutes ago New images of Charon, left, and Pluto in enhanced color by @NewHorizons2015. Wow!
I for one can't wait to see what we discover and invent these next 50plus years. I seriously get sad when i think about what it might be like in like 100 years and what we find out then. If there is some sort of afterlife i hope i get some answers or at least get to sit back and watch what happens on future earth Wish they'd come up with the whole uploading your consciousness into a computer thingy
What we know about Kepler 452-b: • It's the smallest exoplanet discovered to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of a G2-class star, just like the Earth and the Sun. • Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. • It's likely rocky. • While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. • The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. • Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. • The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. • They also said that the planet is likely to have lots of clouds and possibly active volcanoes • They also said that it receives about 10% more energy than the earth does because of the proximity and age of the nearby star, I think this would mean it would have a little bit of a higher temperature • Also since it is 6 billion years old there is way more time than we have had on Earth for life to have developed given the chance • For clarity, Kepler-452 is the star, and Kepler-452b is the planet • They are confident that the planet has an atmosphere but they have no idea of its composition
I'm confused how this works. I would think it being further away would mean it would be cooler in temperature. Is it receiving more energy because it's star is further along in it's life cycle?
This might be the longest gif I've seen but cool. We are a piece of sand compared to the other stars up there. http://i.imgur.com/Y7bQpUR.gifv
Eric Berger @chronsciguy 2m2 minutes ago Tombaugh Region,. Right side of "heart" region shows flowing ices. Unreal imagery
Stunning Nightside Image Reveals Pluto’s Hazy Skies Pluto sends a breathtaking farewell to New Horizons. Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pluto and shows structures as small as 12 miles across. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23, is displayed with north at the top of the frame. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Speeding away from Pluto just seven hours after its July 14 closest approach, the New Horizons spacecraft looked back and captured this spectacular image of Pluto’s atmosphere, backlit by the sun. The image reveals layers of haze that are several times higher than scientists predicted. Just seven hours after closest approach, New Horizons aimed its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) back at Pluto, capturing sunlight streaming through the atmosphere and revealing hazes as high as 80 miles (130 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface. A preliminary analysis of the image shows two distinct layers of haze –one about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface and the other at an altitude of about 30 miles (50 kilometers). “My jaw was on the ground when I saw this first image of an alien atmosphere in the Kuiper Belt,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “It reminds us that exploration brings us more than just incredible discoveries--it brings incredible beauty.” Studying Pluto’s atmosphere provides clues as to what’s happening below. “The hazes detected in this image are a key element in creating the complex hydrocarbon compounds that give Pluto’s surface its reddish hue,” said Michael Summers, a New Horizons co-investigator from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Models suggest that the hazes form when ultraviolet sunlight breaks apart methane gas, a simple hydrocarbon known to reside throughout Pluto’s atmosphere. The breakdown of methane triggers the buildup of more complex hydrocarbon gases, such as ethylene and acetylene, which were also discovered at Pluto by New Horizons. As these hydrocarbons fall to the lower, colder parts of the atmosphere, they condense as ice particles, forming the hazes. Ultraviolent sunlight chemically converts hazes into tholins, the dark hydrocarbons that color Pluto’s surface. Scientists had previously calculated that temperatures would be too warm for hazes to form at altitudes higher than 20 miles (30 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface. With New Horizons detecting hazes at up to 80 miles (130 kilometers), “We’re going to need some new ideas to figure out what’s going on,” said Summers. Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s atmosphere rings its silhouette in this image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Hydrocarbon hazes in the atmosphere, extending as high as 80 miles (130 kilometers) above the surface, are seen for the first time in this image, which was taken on July 14. New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager captured this view about seven hours after the craft’s closest approach, at distance of about 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) from Pluto. Inset: False-color image of hazes reveals a variety of structures, including two distinct layers, one at 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface and the other at about 30 miles (50 kilometers). Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI The hazes in Pluto’s atmosphere, observed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, provide a crucial link between the sunlight-driven chemistry in the upper atmosphere and the reddish-brown hydrocarbons called tholins that rain down and darken the surface. The animation shows several steps: 1) Ultraviolet sunlight breaks apart methane in Pluto’s upper atmosphere. 2) This leads to the buildup of complex hydrocarbons, such as ethylene and acetylene. 3) Clumps of these hydrocarbons condense as ice particles to form the hazes. 4) The hazes are chemically converted to tholins, which fall to the surface and darken Pluto. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
New Horizons Discovers Flowing Ices on Pluto New Horizons discovers flowing ices in Pluto’s heart-shaped feature. In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI NASA’s New Horizons mission has found evidence of exotic ices flowing across Pluto’s surface, at the left edge of its bright heart-shaped area. New close-up images from the spacecraft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) reveal signs of recent geologic activity, something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect. “We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,” said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. “I'm really smiling.” The new close-up images show fascinating detail within the Texas-sized plain (informally named Sputnik Planum) that lies within the western half of Pluto’s heart-shaped region, known as Tombaugh Regio. There, a sheet of ice clearly appears to have flowed—and may still be flowing—in a manner similar to glaciers on Earth. In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum, swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Meanwhile, New Horizons scientists are using enhanced color images (see below) to detect differences in the composition and texture of Pluto’s surface. When close-up images are combined with color data from the Ralph instrument, they paint a new and surprising portrait of Pluto in which a global pattern of zones vary by latitude. The darkest terrains appear at the equator, mid-tones are the norm at mid-latitudes, and a brighter icy expanse dominates the north polar region. The New Horizons science team is interpreting this pattern to be the result of seasonal transport of ices from equator to pole. This pattern is dramatically interrupted by the bright “beating heart” of Pluto. Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away, show features as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers), twice the resolution of the single-image view taken on July 13. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI The “heart of the heart,” Sputnik Planum, is suggestive of a reservoir of ices. The two bluish-white “lobes” that extend to the southwest and northeast of the “heart” may represent exotic ices being transported away from Sputnik Planum. Additionally, new compositional data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument indicate that the center of Sputnik Planum is rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices. “At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier,” said Bill McKinnon, of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain (informally named “Cthulhu Regio”) has been invaded by much newer icy deposits. This annotated image of the southern region of Sputnik Planum illustrates its complexity, including the polygonal shapes of Pluto’s icy plains, its two mountain ranges, and a region where it appears that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain has been invaded by much newer icy deposits. The large crater highlighted in the image is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide, approximately the size of the greater Washington, DC area. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI The newly-discovered range of mountains rises one mile (1.6 kilometers) above the surrounding plains, similar to the height of the Appalachian Mountains in the United States. These peaks have been informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) for Sir Edmund Hillary, who first summited Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953. “For many years, we referred to Pluto as the Everest of planetary exploration,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “It’s fitting that the two climbers who first summited Earth’s highest mountain, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, now have their names on this new Everest.” View a simulated flyover using New Horizons’ close-approach images of Sputnik Planum and Pluto’s newly-discovered mountain range – Hillary Montes, in the video below. This simulated flyover of two regions on Pluto, northwestern Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) and Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains), was created from New Horizons close-approach images. Sputnik Planum has been informally named for Earth’s first artificial satellite, launched in 1957. Hillary Montes have been informally named for Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. The images were acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
New Horizons Reveals Pluto’s Atmospheric Pressure Has Sharply Decreased New Horizons has found that Pluto’s atmosphere has an unexpectedly low surface pressure. Observations with the New Horizons’ REX radio experiment, made about one hour after closest approach to Pluto on July 14, reveal that the atmospheric surface pressure is about half the value previously inferred from Earth-based observations. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Pluto’s atmosphere may be changing before our eyes. Measurements with NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed that Pluto’s atmosphere has an unexpectedly low surface pressure compared to that derived from previous observations. One explanation for the low pressure is that about half of Pluto’s atmosphere may have recently frozen onto the planet’s surface. If confirmed, it could indicate that further decreases in pressure may soon be in store. The pressure measurement is the first ever obtained for the surface of Pluto. It was made by REX, the spacecraft’s radio experiment, about one hour after New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto on July 14. In a carefully-planned observation that had never before been attempted, two radio dishes on Earth--part of NASA’s Deep Space Network-- beamed radio waves precisely timed to reach Pluto just as New Horizons passed behind the dwarf planet. The radio waves traveled through Pluto’s atmosphere en route to the spacecraft and were bent, or refracted, by the atmospheric gases. The amount of bending -- which appears as a shift in the frequency of the radio waves -- revealed that the gas pressure at Pluto’s surface was only 1/100-thousandth that of the pressure on the surface of Earth. That’s about half the amount calculated from previous Earth-based observations. “For the first time we have ground truth, measuring the surface pressure at Pluto, giving us an invaluable perspective on conditions at the surface of the planet,” said New Horizons researcher Ivan Linscott of Stanford University. “This crucial measurement may be telling us that Pluto is undergoing long-anticipated global change.” New Horizons is expected to transmit a wider variety of REX measurements of Pluto’s atmospheric pressure in the next few weeks.
Will never forget walking into Astronomy on a Tuesday morning and my professor throwing a fucking fit that they made Pluto a dwarf planet instead. It prompted a trip to the planetarium so that was neat.
I'm sad knowing that even if we see Kepler-452b waving at us or receive some sort of radio signal from them, we won't be able to communicate back. :( But then if some intelligent beings from a planet that has been around billions of years longer than us have figured out warp-speed, we're totally getting fucked 8 ways to Sunday.
They won't receive our message for 1,400 years so I think we're gonna be okay. Unless we figure out this whole immortality thing, which would be pretty sweet.
Responding to any alien civilization advanced enough to contact us could be a huge mistake. If they're able to send those signals and they're X thousand light years away, they've probably developed the technology to come and visit us. Responding would give them confirmation that we're here and give them a reason to come looking for us. Why they want to find us is the big question. It could be benevolent or it could be for conquest. Personally, I'd rather leave sleeping dogs lie and just be happy knowing that someone else is out there.
Yep. We're all good here. Unless shit hits the fan. Then I say we package up some light material for them on our existence (cat videos, the ending to LOST, some POWE snaps, and the Horsey Surprise thread) and send it to them. When they get it 1400 years later and decide it's a declaration of war, we'll already be dead but we can have a good, hearty laugh beforehand.
So you need to hit the ball over the river of lava to the right, but not too far to go in the mile deep crevasse.
I don't think golf courses are proportional to the size of the planet? Also, just because the planet is the size of Jupiter doesn't necessarily mean there has to be lava... Spoiler Sorry, I'm still ornery because Pluto isn't considered a planet.
Stolen from Reddit, falling through Jupiter: "For the interior of Jupiter, let's imagine taking a descent from cloud-tops down to the core based on our best guesses of what lies below. You start falling through the high, white ammonia clouds starting at 0.5 atmospheres, where the Sun is still visible. It's very cold here, -150 C (-240 F). Your rate of descent is roughly 2.5x that of Earth, since gravity is much stronger on Jupiter. You emerge out the bottom of the cloud deck somewhere near 1 atmosphere. It's still somewhat bright, with sunlight filtering through the ammonia clouds much like an overcast day on Earth. Below, you see the second cloud-deck made of roiling brown ammonium hydrosulphide, starting about 2 atmospheres. As you fall through the bottom of this second cloud deck, it's now quite dark, but warming up as the pressure increases. Beneath you are white water clouds forming towering thunderstorms, with the darkness punctuated by bright flashes of lightning starting somewhere around 5 atmospheres. As you pass through this third and final cloud-deck it's now finally warmed up to room temperature, if only the pressure weren't starting to crush you. Emerging out the bottom, the pressure is now intense, and it's starting to get quite warm, and there's nothing but the dark abyss of ever-denser hydrogen gas beneath you. You fall through this abyss for a very, very long time. You eventually start to notice that the atmosphere has become thick enough that you can swim through it. It's not quite liquid, not quite gas, but a "supercritical fluid" that shares properties of each. Your body would naturally stop falling and settle out somewhere at this level, where your density and the atmosphere's density are equal. However, you've brought your "heavy boots" and continue your descent. After a very, very long time of falling through ever greater pressure and heat, there's no longer complete darkness. The atmosphere is now warm enough that it begins to glow - red-hot at first, then yellow-hot, and finally white-hot. You're now 30% of the way down, and have just hit the metallic region at 2 million atmospheres of pressure. Still glowing white-hot, hydrogen has become so dense as to become a liquid metal. It roils and convects, generating strong magnetic fields in the process. Most materials passing through this deep, deep ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen would instantly dissolve, but thankfully you've brought your unobtainium spacesuit...which is good, because it's now 10,000 C (18,000 F). Falling ever deeper through this hot glowing sea of liquid metal, you reflect that a mai tai would really hit the spot right about now. After a very, very, very long time falling through this liquid metal ocean, you're now 80% of the way down...when suddenly your boots hit a solid "surface", insomuch as you can call it a surface. Beneath you is a core weighing in at 25 Earth-masses, made of rock and exotic ices that can only exist under the crushing pressure of 25 million atmospheres. You check your cell phone to tell you friends about your voyage...but sadly, it melted in the metallic ocean - and besides, they only have 3G down here. TL;DR: You would stop falling about 10% of the way down, where your density matches the density of the surrounding hydrogen "supercritical fluid"."
Honestly I'm not sure what they would even want with us if they are that advanced. Any materials we have on earth could be easily mined on asteroids. And it's not like fossil fuels are going to provide the type of energy that they've manage to harness if they can travel through a worm hole to us. I guess they could just be dickheads though.
I think I just saw the Chinese long march 3b satellites go into orbit It was almost directly overhead at ~8 cst...it looked like a really bright planet until it seemingly exploded and I saw what must've been trails from the booster
I know more than the average person regarding space but I still know very little. I don't know why I never really opened this thread before. Talking about space is so interesting but still so frustrating at the same time because it's so difficult to even begin to appreciate the scale of what we're talking about here because there's nothing to even consider referencing it against
I've heard NGT say that the sun is scheduled to engulf our orbit in about 5 Billion years. Now I have little faith that humanity will be last even 10,000 more years but should they figure it out and make it to the point that the earth would no longer be habitable, what's the next step? I know it's pointless and stupid but it's fun to think about.
I feel at home in this thread. In my actual life I can barely find anyone who will actually want to talk about space outside of a couple good friends. Most of them want to talk about stupid pointless shit like pop culture or what controversy is trending on social media and the others just say "I don't want to talk about that. Space scares me". Really infuriating for me
A big group of my friends and I rented out a cabin in the Hocking Hills (edge of Appalachian mountains) and one night a couple of us were sitting around the fire (stoned to the bone) looking up at the stars and talking about space. It was pretty sweet for about 20 mins until some of the type of friends you described tried to interject and killed it. It was maddening.
Copy and Paste Fermi paradox Spoiler The Fermi Paradox By Tim Urban Everyone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something. Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?” ________________ A really starry sky seems vast—but all we’re looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). So what we’re really looking at is this: Galaxy image: Nick Risinger When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, “Is there other intelligent life out there?” Let’s put some numbers to it— As many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 – 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe—so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxy out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 1022 and 1024 total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there. The science world isn’t in total agreement about what percentage of those stars are “sun-like” (similar in size, temperature, and luminosity)—opinions typically range from 5% to 20%. Going with the most conservative side of that (5%), and the lower end for the number of total stars (1022), gives us 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion sun-like stars. There’s also a debate over what percentage of those sun-like stars might be orbited by an Earth-like planet (one with similar temperature conditions that could have liquid water and potentially support life similar to that on Earth). Some say it’s as high as 50%, but let’s go with the more conservative 22% that came out of a recent PNAS study. That suggests that there’s a potentially-habitable Earth-like planet orbiting at least 1% of the total stars in the universe—a total of 100 billion billion Earth-like planets. So there are 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you’re on the beach. Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative. Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life (if that’s true, every grain of sand would represent one planet with life on it). And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe. Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we’d estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.[1] SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If we’re right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn’t SETI’s satellite array pick up all kinds of signals? But it hasn’t. Not one. Ever. Where is everybody? It gets stranger. Our sun is relatively young in the lifespan of the universe. There are far older stars with far older Earth-like planets, which should in theory mean civilizations far more advanced than our own. As an example, let’s compare our 4.54 billion-year-old Earth to a hypothetical 8 billion-year-old Planet X. If Planet X has a similar story to Earth, let’s look at where their civilization would be today (using the orange timespan as a reference to show how huge the green timespan is): The technology and knowledge of a civilization only 1,000 years ahead of us could be as shocking to us as our world would be to a medieval person. A civilization 1 million years ahead of us might be as incomprehensible to us as human culture is to chimpanzees. And Planet X is 3.4 billion years ahead of us… There’s something called The Kardashev Scale, which helps us group intelligent civilizations into three broad categories by the amount of energy they use: A Type I Civilization has the ability to use all of the energy on their planet. We’re not quite a Type I Civilization, but we’re close (Carl Sagan created a formula for this scale which puts us at a Type 0.7 Civilization). A Type II Civilization can harness all of the energy of their host star. Our feeble Type I brains can hardly imagine how someone would do this, but we’ve tried our best, imagining things like a Dyson Sphere. A Type III Civilization blows the other two away, accessing power comparable to that of the entire Milky Way galaxy. If this level of advancement sounds hard to believe, remember Planet X above and their 3.4 billion years of further development. If a civilization on Planet X were similar to ours and were able to survive all the way to Type III level, the natural thought is that they’d probably have mastered inter-stellar travel by now, possibly even colonizing the entire galaxy. One hypothesis as to how galactic colonization could happen is by creating machinery that can travel to other planets, spend 500 years or so self-replicating using the raw materials on their new planet, and then send two replicas off to do the same thing. Even without traveling anywhere near the speed of light, this process would colonize the whole galaxy in 3.75 million years, a relative blink of an eye when talking in the scale of billions of years: Source: Scientific American: “Where Are They” Continuing to speculate, if 1% of intelligent life survives long enough to become a potentially galaxy-colonizing Type III Civilization, our calculations above suggest that there should be at least 1,000 Type III Civilizations in our galaxy alone—and given the power of such a civilization, their presence would likely be pretty noticeable. And yet, we see nothing, hear nothing, and we’re visited by no one. So where is everybody? _____________________ Welcome to the Fermi Paradox. We have no answer to the Fermi Paradox—the best we can do is “possible explanations.” And if you ask ten different scientists what their hunch is about the correct one, you’ll get ten different answers. You know when you hear about humans of the past debating whether the Earth was round or if the sun revolved around the Earth or thinking that lightning happened because of Zeus, and they seem so primitive and in the dark? That’s about where we are with this topic. In taking a look at some of the most-discussed possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, let’s divide them into two broad categories—those explanations which assume that there’s no sign of Type II and Type III Civilizations because there are none of them out there, and those which assume they’re out there and we’re not seeing or hearing anything for other reasons: Explanation Group 1: There are no signs of higher (Type II and III) civilizations because there are no higher civilizations in existence. Those who subscribe to Group 1 explanations point to something called the non-exclusivity problem, which rebuffs any theory that says, “There are higher civilizations, but none of them have made any kind of contact with us because they all _____.” Group 1 people look at the math, which says there should be so many thousands (or millions) of higher civilizations, that at least one of them would be an exception to the rule. Even if a theory held for 99.99% of higher civilizations, the other .01% would behave differently and we’d become aware of their existence. Therefore, say Group 1 explanations, it must be that there are no super-advanced civilizations. And since the math suggests that there are thousands of them just in our own galaxy, something else must be going on. This something else is called The Great Filter. The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there’s a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter. If this theory is true, the big question is, Where in the timeline does the Great Filter occur? It turns out that when it comes to the fate of humankind, this question is very important. Depending on where The Great Filter occurs, we’re left with three possible realities: We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked. 1. We’re Rare (The Great Filter is Behind Us) One hope we have is that The Great Filter is behind us—we managed to surpass it, which would mean it’s extremely rare for life to make it to our level of intelligence. The diagram below shows only two species making it past, and we’re one of them. This scenario would explain why there are no Type III Civilizations…but it would also mean that we could be one of the few exceptions now that we’ve made it this far. It would mean we have hope. On the surface, this sounds a bit like people 500 years ago suggesting that the Earth is the center of the universe—it implies that we’re special. However, something scientists call “observation selection effect” suggests that anyone who is pondering their own rarity is inherently part of an intelligent life “success story”—and whether they’re actually rare or quite common, the thoughts they ponder and conclusions they draw will be identical. This forces us to admit that being special is at least a possibility. And if we are special, when exactly did we become special—i.e. which step did we surpass that almost everyone else gets stuck on? One possibility: The Great Filter could be at the very beginning—it might be incredibly unusual for life to begin at all. This is a candidate because it took about a billion years of Earth’s existence to finally happen, and because we have tried extensively to replicate that event in labs and have never been able to do it. If this is indeed The Great Filter, it would mean that not only is there no intelligent life out there, there may be no other life at all. Another possibility: The Great Filter could be the jump from the simple prokaryote cell to the complex eukaryote cell. After prokaryotes came into being, they remained that way for almost two billion years before making the evolutionary jump to being complex and having a nucleus. If this is The Great Filter, it would mean the universe is teeming with simple prokaryote cells and almost nothing beyond that. There are a number of other possibilities—some even think the most recent leap we’ve made to our current intelligence is a Great Filter candidate. While the leap from semi-intelligent life (chimps) to intelligent life (humans) doesn’t at first seem like a miraculous step, Steven Pinker rejects the idea of an inevitable “climb upward” of evolution: “Since evolution does not strive for a goal but just happens, it uses the adaptation most useful for a given ecological niche, and the fact that, on Earth, this led to technological intelligence only once so far may suggest that this outcome of natural selection is rare and hence by no means a certain development of the evolution of a tree of life.” Most leaps do not qualify as Great Filter candidates. Any possible Great Filter must be one-in-a-billion type thing where one or more total freak occurrences need to happen to provide a crazy exception—for that reason, something like the jump from single-cell to multi-cellular life is ruled out, because it has occurred as many as 46 times, in isolated incidents, just on this planet alone. For the same reason, if we were to find a fossilized eukaryote cell on Mars, it would rule the above “simple-to-complex cell” leap out as a possible Great Filter (as well as anything before that point on the evolutionary chain)—because if it happened on both Earth and Mars, it’s almost definitely not a one-in-a-billion freak occurrence. If we are indeed rare, it could be because of a fluky biological event, but it also could be attributed to what is called the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which suggests that though there may be many Earth-like planets, the particular conditions on Earth—whether related to the specifics of this solar system, its relationship with the moon (a moon that large is unusual for such a small planet and contributes to our particular weather and ocean conditions), or something about the planet itself—are exceptionally friendly to life. 2. We’re the First For Group 1 Thinkers, if the Great Filter is not behind us, the one hope we have is that conditions in the universe are just recently, for the first time since the Big Bang, reaching a place that would allow intelligent life to develop. In that case, we and many other species may be on our way to super-intelligence, and it simply hasn’t happened yet. We happen to be here at the right time to become one of the first super-intelligent civilizations. One example of a phenomenon that could make this realistic is the prevalence of gamma-ray bursts, insanely huge explosions that we’ve observed in distant galaxies. In the same way that it took the early Earth a few hundred million years before the asteroids and volcanoes died down and life became possible, it could be that the first chunk of the universe’s existence was full of cataclysmic events like gamma-ray bursts that would incinerate everything nearby from time to time and prevent any life from developing past a certain stage. Now, perhaps, we’re in the midst of an astrobiological phase transition and this is the first time any life has been able to evolve for this long, uninterrupted. 3. We’re Fucked (The Great Filter is Ahead of Us) If we’re neither rare nor early, Group 1 thinkers conclude that The Great Filter must be in our future. This would suggest that life regularly evolves to where we are, but that something prevents life from going much further and reaching high intelligence in almost all cases—and we’re unlikely to be an exception. One possible future Great Filter is a regularly-occurring cataclysmic natural event, like the above-mentioned gamma-ray bursts, except they’re unfortunately not done yet and it’s just a matter of time before all life on Earth is suddenly wiped out by one. Another candidate is the possible inevitability that nearly all intelligent civilizations end up destroying themselves once a certain level of technology is reached. This is why Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom says that “no news is good news.” The discovery of even simple life on Mars would be devastating, because it would cut out a number of potential Great Filters behind us. And if we were to find fossilized complex life on Mars, Bostrom says “it would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover,” because it would mean The Great Filter is almost definitely ahead of us—ultimately dooming the species. Bostrom believes that when it comes to The Fermi Paradox, “the silence of the night sky is golden.” Explanation Group 2: Type II and III intelligent civilizations are out there—and there are logical reasons why we might not have heard from them. Group 2 explanations get rid of any notion that we’re rare or special or the first at anything—on the contrary, they believe in the Mediocrity Principle, whose starting point is that there is nothing unusual or rare about our galaxy, solar system, planet, or level of intelligence, until evidence proves otherwise. They’re also much less quick to assume that the lack of evidence of higher intelligence beings is evidence of their nonexistence—emphasizing the fact that our search for signals stretches only about 100 light years away from us (0.1% across the galaxy) and suggesting a number of possible explanations. Here are 10: Possibility 1) Super-intelligent life could very well have already visited Earth, but before we were here. In the scheme of things, sentient humans have only been around for about 50,000 years, a little blip of time. If contact happened before then, it might have made some ducks flip out and run into the water and that’s it. Further, recorded history only goes back 5,500 years—a group of ancient hunter-gatherer tribes may have experienced some crazy alien shit, but they had no good way to tell anyone in the future about it. Possibility 2) The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy. The Americas may have been colonized by Europeans long before anyone in a small Inuit tribe in far northern Canada realized it had happened. There could be an urbanization component to the interstellar dwellings of higher species, in which all the neighboring solar systems in a certain area are colonized and in communication, and it would be impractical and purposeless for anyone to deal with coming all the way out to the random part of the spiral where we live. Possibility 3) The entire concept of physical colonization is a hilariously backward concept to a more advanced species. Remember the picture of the Type II Civilization above with the sphere around their star? With all that energy, they might have created a perfect environment for themselves that satisfies their every need. They might have crazy-advanced ways of reducing their need for resources and zero interest in leaving their happy utopia to explore the cold, empty, undeveloped universe. An even more advanced civilization might view the entire physical world as a horribly primitive place, having long ago conquered their own biology and uploaded their brains to a virtual reality, eternal-life paradise. Living in the physical world of biology, mortality, wants, and needs might seem to them the way we view primitive ocean species living in the frigid, dark sea. FYI, thinking about another life form having bested mortality makes me incredibly jealous and upset. Possibility 4) There are scary predator civilizations out there, and most intelligent life knows better than to broadcast any outgoing signals and advertise their location. This is an unpleasant concept and would help explain the lack of any signals being received by the SETI satellites. It also means that we might be the super naive newbies who are being unbelievably stupid and risky by ever broadcasting outward signals. There’s a debate going on currently about whether we should engage in METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence—the reverse of SETI) or not, and most people say we should not. Stephen Hawking warns, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) called the practice of METI “deeply unwise and immature,” and recommended that “the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.” Scary.[2] Possibility 5) There’s only one instance of higher-intelligent life—a “superpredator” civilization (like humans are here on Earth)—who is far more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level. This would suck. The way it might work is that it’s an inefficient use of resources to exterminate all emerging intelligences, maybe because most die out on their own. But past a certain point, the super beings make their move—because to them, an emerging intelligent species becomes like a virus as it starts to grow and spread. This theory suggests that whoever was the first in the galaxy to reach intelligence won, and now no one else has a chance. This would explain the lack of activity out there because it would keep the number of super-intelligent civilizations to just one. Possibility 6) There’s plenty of activity and noise out there, but our technology is too primitive and we’re listening for the wrong things. Like walking into a modern-day office building, turning on a walkie-talkie, and when you hear no activity (which of course you wouldn’t hear because everyone’s texting, not using walkie-talkies), determining that the building must be empty. Or maybe, as Carl Sagan has pointed out, it could be that our minds work exponentially faster or slower than another form of intelligence out there—e.g. it takes them 12 years to say “Hello,” and when we hear that communication, it just sounds like white noise to us. Possibility 7) We are receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it. The more I learn about the topic, the more this seems like an idiotic theory, but I had to mention it because it’s talked about so much. Possibility 8) Higher civilizations are aware of us and observing us (AKA the “Zoo Hypothesis”). As far as we know, super-intelligent civilizations exist in a tightly-regulated galaxy, and our Earth is treated like part of a vast and protected national park, with a strict “Look but don’t touch” rule for planets like ours. We wouldn’t notice them, because if a far smarter species wanted to observe us, it would know how to easily do so without us realizing it. Maybe there’s a rule similar to the Star Trek’s “Prime Directive” which prohibits super-intelligent beings from making any open contact with lesser species like us or revealing themselves in any way, until the lesser species has reached a certain level of intelligence. Possibility 9) Higher civilizations are here, all around us. But we’re too primitive to perceive them. Michio Kaku sums it up like this: Lets say we have an ant hill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the ant hill, they’re building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is “Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the intentions of the beings building the highway next to them? So it’s not that we can’t pick up the signals from Planet X using our technology, it’s that we can’t even comprehend what the beings from Planet X are or what they’re trying to do. It’s so beyond us that even if they really wanted to enlighten us, it would be like trying to teach ants about the internet. Along those lines, this may also be an answer to “Well if there are so many fancy Type III Civilizations, why haven’t they contacted us yet?” To answer that, let’s ask ourselves—when Pizarro made his way into Peru, did he stop for a while at an anthill to try to communicate? Was he magnanimous, trying to help the ants in the anthill? Did he become hostile and slow his original mission down in order to smash the anthill apart? Or was the anthill of complete and utter and eternal irrelevance to Pizarro? That might be our situation here. Possibility 10) We’re completely wrong about our reality. There are a lot of ways we could just be totally off with everything we think. The universe might appear one way and be something else entirely, like a hologram. Or maybe we’re the aliens and we were planted here as an experiment or as a form of fertilizer. There’s even a chance that we’re all part of a computer simulation by some researcher from another world, and other forms of life simply weren’t programmed into the simulation. ________________ As we continue along with our possibly-futile search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I’m not really sure what I’m rooting for. Frankly, learning either that we’re officially alone in the universe or that we’re officially joined by others would be creepy, which is a theme with all of the surreal storylines listed above—whatever the truth actually is, it’s mindblowing. Beyond its shocking science fiction component, The Fermi Paradox also leaves me with a deep humbling. Not just the normal “Oh yeah, I’m microscopic and my existence lasts for three seconds” humbling that the universe always triggers. The Fermi Paradox brings out a sharper, more personal humbling, one that can only happen after spending hours of research hearing your species’ most renowned scientists present insane theories, change their minds again and again, and wildly contradict each other—reminding us that future generations will look at us the same way we see the ancient people who were sure that the stars were the underside of the dome of heaven, and they’ll think “Wow they really had no idea what was going on.” Compounding all of this is the blow to our species’ self-esteem that comes with all of this talk about Type II and III Civilizations. Here on Earth, we’re the king of our little castle, proud ruler of the huge group of imbeciles who share the planet with us. And in this bubble with no competition and no one to judge us, it’s rare that we’re ever confronted with the concept of being a dramatically inferior species to anyone. But after spending a lot of time with Type II and III Civilizations over the past week, our power and pride are seeming a bit David Brent-esque. That said, given that my normal outlook is that humanity is a lonely orphan on a tiny rock in the middle of a desolate universe, the humbling fact that we’re probably not as smart as we think we are, and the possibility that a lot of what we’re sure about might be wrong, sounds wonderful. It opens the door just a crack that maybe, just maybe, there might be more to the story than we realize.
I'm not even half way through and this is absolutely fantastic reading. The Great Filter theory is something I've never heard of but independently thought of at a much lower level. Early thoughts: We're either group 1 or group 3 in the Great Filter, think both could have some very strong arguments.
Firmly team 3. Believe that the vast majority of potential civilization which reach a zenith where they can cause their own extinction through various means, and the reset button will get hit. if you think about it, commercial colonization would probably require that the planet be of one mind/government, and that isn't something we will see anytime soon. Think it's far more likely you get one psycho who gets his hands on some nukes and obliterates a bunch of shit (Looking at you NK and Iran)
I found this one particularly interesting... Possibility 8) Higher civilizations are aware of us and observing us (AKA the “Zoo Hypothesis”). As far as we know, super-intelligent civilizations exist in a tightly-regulated galaxy, and our Earth is treated like part of a vast and protected national park, with a strict “Look but don’t touch” rule for planets like ours. We wouldn’t notice them, because if a far smarter species wanted to observe us, it would know how to easily do so without us realizing it. Maybe there’s a rule similar to the Star Trek’s “Prime Directive” which prohibits super-intelligent beings from making any open contact with lesser species like us or revealing themselves in any way, until the lesser species has reached a certain level of intelligence. I'm super interested in Simulation theory so I liked this one.
Team 3 is interesting. So the question becomes, can humanity get to a type 2 civilization (and I assume in this theory, live in general peace because I assume all human basic needs can be met in this civilization) before we kill each other with our technology (our version of the great filter)?
assuming the great filter isn't a natural phenomenon like previous extinction events on earth (ie an asteroid) Humanity should be able to survive those with colonization, so the question becomes, can we colonize effectively before that happens? I think jorge had told me Hawkins thinks that if humanity makes it another 200 years, we should be able to survive a natural extinction event.